When you think of Manchester United, you think of a club with a rich history of trophies, glory and some of the best players to ever grace a football pitch: Beckham, Scholes, Keane, Yorke, Van Nistelrooy, Cantona, Ronaldo, Rooney. The list of stars who came and conquered at the illustrious club is as memorable as the goals and performances that lead to those successes. On the way to the club becoming the most important in Premier League history, transfer fee records have been continually shattered with reckless abandon, in order to capture the upcoming stars or the best players in the world and turn them into United greats and continue the culture of winning. Sometimes, those expensive gambles paid off and United reaped the benefits on the pitch, but inevitably, that was not always the case, and it wasn't always down to players simply being terrible. After all, anybody given the heady accolade of a United squad number must have impressed the scouts or the manager at some stage, so their problems on the pitch must have been down to something else entirely - whether because they were signed at the wrong time, for the wrong system, or just weren't up to the pressures of the Premier League and the Theatre of Dreams. There are many United flops who shouldn't have been signed in the first place, but they aren't as interesting as the ones who looked promising and utterly failed to live up to their billing, which is precisely the unlikely lot we're looking at.
